A smart card, chip card, or integrated circuit card (ICC) is any pocket-sized card with embedded integrated circuits. Smart cards are traditionally made of plastic, generally polyvinyl chloride, but sometimes polyethylene terephthalate based polyesters, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene or polycarbonate. Smart cards can be used for a number of different applications including identification, authentication, data storage and application processing. Both physical access control and logical access control applications have benefited from the use of smart cards.
Access cards in particular have been prevalent for a number of years. The purpose of access cards is to allow a holder thereof to gain entry to a physical or logical asset by presenting their card to a reader and then having the reader authenticate the card and then verify that the card is valid and the holder thereof is entitled access to a protected asset. There are a new generation of access cards available such as the HID Seos® card that can be read by devices (e.g., readers, reader/writers, mobile phones, smartphones, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), etc.) supporting NFC/ISO 14443 standards, Bluetooth standards, etc. Four standards currently dominate RFID communication: ISO/IEC 14443-A, ISO/IEC 14443-B, ISO/IEC 15693, and JIS X6319-4, each of which are hereby incorporated herein by reference in their entirety. Most access control systems installed over the last decade support one or more of these standards, or can be upgraded to support one or more of these standards. Consequently, there is a huge legacy of installed access control readers that use these standards on global basis.
The same standards are used for other applications such as transport, luggage identification, ticketing, payment according to the Contactless EMV standard (Europay, MasterCard, Visa), and more.
One downside to some card technologies is that a user is required to carry separate cards for different applications. In other words, a user has to carry one card for physical access purposes and other card for other applications. With the proliferation of mobile communications, the user is now carrying multiple different access cards in addition to their mobile communication device (e.g., cellular phone, smart phone, etc.). It can be appreciated that having to carry some many different devices presents an inconvenience to users.